reinterpreted, ignored, and hailed. The
colorful characters on these pages include
Vivekananda and Krishnamacharya, two
giants in modern yoga, as well as liter-
ary figures such as T.S. Eliot. There is also
Alberuni, a Muslim scientist and scholar
who translated a commentary on the
Yoga Sutra a thousand years ago, and the
outrageous Madame Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky, who fused the principles of
the Yoga Sutra with Western ideas of the
occult.
THE HEART OF BUDDHIST MEDITATION
The Buddha’s Way of Mindfulness
By Nyanaponika Thera
Weiser Books 2014; 288 pp., $18.95 (paper)
The late Nyanaponika Thera was a
German-born Theravada monk who
cofounded the Buddhist Publication
Society. He was the teacher of Bhikkhu
Bodhi and other contemporary Western
Buddhist leaders, and his book The Heart
of Buddhist Meditation, first published
in 1954, was instrumental in introduc-
ing Vipassana and mindfulness to the
West. As Sylvia Boorstein remarks in the
foreword of this reprint: “Apart from the
meticulous yet accessible writing style
with which the venerable Nyanaponika
builds every point, I feel a warmth and
friendliness in his tone that makes me
feel as if he is talking to me.” The Heart
of Buddhist Meditation includes the highly
influential Maha-Satipatthana-Sutta and
the Greater Discourse on the Foundations
of Mindfulness, as well as an anthology of
other texts on right mindfulness, which
have been translated from Pali and San-
skrit with notes.
particularly interested in the material that
relates to his Zen practice. In one televi-
sion interview from 1997, Cohen shows
journalist Stina lundberg Dabrowski a
slice of his life at Mount Baldy Zen Cen-
ter in California. He offers her a nip of
whiskey, shows her the correct posture for
meditation, and explains why he sees his
monastic residence as a “kind of hospital
up here in the mountains.” He’d always
felt a chronic dissatisfaction, even anguish,
and nothing really helped. Finally, he was
driven to the cure of Zen. “You learn how
to sit,” he says, “you learn how to walk,
you learn how to eat, you learn how to
be quiet... And you have the opportunity
for self-reform.” Besides, he adds, without
this discipline “I’d be lying in bed watch-
ing television, scratching myself.”
THE YOGA SUTRA OF PATANJALI
A Biography
By David Gordon White
Princeton university Press 2014; 288 pp.,
$24.95 (cloth)
With roughly seventeen million people
regularly attending yoga classes in the
United States, yoga studios are crank-
ing out teachers. The required reading
in almost all of the teacher training pro-
grams is the same ancient text: the Yoga
Sutra of Patanjali. This is curious, because
the lion’s share of today’s yoga classes are
almost exclusively focused on postures,
stretching, and breathing, yet the Yoga
Sutra’s 195 abstruse aphorisms say next
to nothing about these practices. The Yoga
Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography is a lively
account of this sutra’s unlikely history
and how it has variously been interpreted,
H  P D:
Teachings on the Eight Worldly Dharmas
By Lama Zopa Rinpoche
Edited by Gordon McDougall $10
“Buddhism is a house full of treasures—
practices for gaining the happiness of
future lives, the bliss of liberation and the
supreme happiness of enlightenment—
but knowing the difference between
Dharma and non-Dharma is the
key that opens the door to all those
treasures.” —Lama Zopa Rinpoche
  
Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive
po box 636, lincoln, ma 01773
info@lamayeshe.com
www.lamayeshe.com
shambhala sun september 2014
76